Live data from Hacker News

Migrating from GNU Stow to Chezmoi

rednafi.com

151–152 of 152 posts

Re: Migrating from GNU Stow to Chezmoi

#151
post #93

I've checked out stow, chezmoi, yadm, and others over the years, but I originally started off by rolling my own dotfiles setup with a Git repo about 6 years ago: https://github.com/jaminthorns/environment I don't really recommend it to others, since there's all these great tools that have the features you need (per-machine config, secrets, templating), but I get a deep satisfaction from the fact that I understand eve…

> don't really recommend it to others, since there's all these great tools that have the features you need I thought about using any one of those tools but happily chose shell scripts and symlinks instead. It hasn't let me down in almost a decade with https://github.com/nickjj/dotfriedrice and would highly recommend this approach. It's basically a 2,500 line shell script to fully automate setting up a system from scr…

Haha, I'll elaborate on that a bit. I don't recommend rolling your own setup to most people that I encourage to version their dotfiles. The vast majority of the developers I've met don't have any type of dotfiles setup, so I wouldn't want to recommend something I know would take significantly more work or overwhelm them. If they're going from no versioning to something, that's a huge improvement, and it's nice to get a lot of the advanced features for free.

But, for the people who value the "toolbench" of their craft, investing in it over time, and having it grow with them long-term, I will absolutely proselytize the reasons I've stayed with my custom-built setup. You're clearly one of those people, thanks for sharing. :)

Re: Migrating from GNU Stow to Chezmoi

#152

I learned about Stow after I found out about Chezmoi, and felt like Chezmoi was the better fit for me. I make heavy use of templating to keep work / personal aliases and functions separate, and could not be happier with the outcome.

It is definitely a better fit because Stow was never intended to function as a manager for dotfiles under version control.
Post reply on HN